laptop DVD drive won't open

[Biggerhammer]

Hello all-
I have a Sony Vaio F390 laptop. I just bought it from my work. I'm embarassed to ask for help on such a really simple problem, but the DVD drive won't open.
Hitting the eject button while Windows is up or while rebooting doesn't work. Neither does right-clicking to eject in windows.
While installing windows, I shut the machine down. My theory is that there might be some sort of 'lock' set on the drive, since it ejected normally until then.
Any ideas?

 

[Paulson]

There's no paperclip hole?

 

[Motero]

Yeah check for the small hole on the side of the drive. You can usually use a paperclip to get it open. If you can't use a cd when it's in, your drive might be bad.

 

[Biggerhammer]

There is a paperclip hole but when I use it, nothing pushes in- and the drive doesn't open. The drive was working until a moment ago and there was no trauma, so I suppose it could be broken but it really feel smore like a software lock of some sort.

 

[Gunbuster]

Software can not lock the drive when the power is off, try the paperclip eject hole again

 

[Biggerhammer]

Eject hole didn't work. I wound up disassembling the laptop, then the DVD-drive. The emergency-release button (paperclip hole) was jammed with crud. I cleaned it out and it works fine now.

Thank you all for the advice.

 

[bacillus]

jammed with crud

:Q

 

[Biggerhammer]

I'm not sure I want to know how that happened, but it's cured now.